A Pet Story of Trishul Park
Arin had always avoided having a pet dog or, for that matter, any creature at all. The idea of keeping a pet never appealed to him, not in the past and not now; his reluctance to own one was the opposite of liking other people’s or outside pets.
Even a mimicking, speaking parakeet couldn’t be kept as a pet, even though he still deeply adores the extraordinary memory of Mr. and Mrs. Saha’s plum-headed green parrot, which had a special gift for parodying human speech, often in lively, pompous tones that charmed everyone who knew the bird named Mithu-Pakhi perched on a ledge in a cage. And Arin knew that his close family friends, Capt. Roy and his better half, Mrs. Roy, and their children felt the joy of owning a pet: a cantankerous dog named Goldie.
Capt. Roy (Ray Kaku to Arin) was a veteran army man, soon to retire in a few years, who owned a longish Lambretta scooter that could carry not fewer than four or five children and a couple of adults alike at a time, riding his ‘pushpak vimana’ like a stately scion of some anonymous, long-lost kingly dynasty that never existed in the real world. Capt. Roy was, however, a dignified gentleman with a pot belly (which was actually a misnomer; he was more of a veritable food connoisseur who happened to have a curvaceous obesity, that’s all. Who is hell is anybody for blaming him to be pot-bellied!), a fun-loving Army man who loved living life and eating king-size to the fullest and being happy about everything like a Laughing Buddha.
That was Ray Kaku, a round-bellied, ego-free gentleman hardly found in today’s fast-paced world. Their happy family lived in the farthest nook of the Trishul Park and kept a pet, a locally sourced black-and-white dingo they named Goldie. It was always tethered at their dormitory’s front porch. Not ‘Goldy,’ but Goldie was its name—a four-pawed dynamo that had a passion for barking, to say the least. An animal character not far from Mr. and Mrs. Saha’s yapper dog, Roxy!
Now this dog, Goldie, was a cantankerous, restless dog. Compulsively barking nonstop even though there is no obvious trigger—yapping and snarling as though stuck in a loop of its own jingoistic habitual behaviour. Barking ‘politics’ that no one understood was his favourite pastime. At one point, even the owners stopped caring much, probably fed up with its flagrant habits, while being unable to make it learn suitable dog manners. It seemed like the dingo never liked anyone, except its daily bunch of large bones in a soup, bought from somewhere, and of course, not from a pet store. Alwal didn’t really have any in the early 1980s. Arin did not try to find out where the oversized bones came from, but only guessed that they probably came from the only mutton chop shop by the interstate highway. This is how the days of the dog went by, wagging its lilliput-like tail and happily barking away, in high-pitched glory.
Pinku, Capt. Roy Junior, who had been practically all his college and post-college life a highfalutin, hard-core Samanta Fox and acid wash jeans fanatic, often tended to their attention-seeking, whiny dog—as did his gracefully smart sis, Sangeeta, who drew positive attention from a Pune-based business entrepreneurial wheeler-dealer and promptly got wedded to him immediately after she completed, as if in a rush, her Class 12 board exam, and their caring mother, dropping chewable bones bought from a roadside butcher shop, cooked chicken, or an assortment of chopped meat chops, mince, and fish bones in the dog’s regular ceramic bowl placed on the porch steps. Surely, a lucky dog; the four-legged whiner was vaccinated regularly too!
Except that there was no way they could prevent their constantly whining dog from being a public disturbance. It whined no matter what anybody said about its doggy neurosis. But luckily, it was not much of a bother to anyone since the dorm the Roys lived in was on the farthest fringe of the great domestic expanse of Trishul Park, where, except for one neighbour who resided bang opposite, others were far away in the tree-covered, sylvan vicinity, not to speak of a long railway tracks: one pair going north and the other to the south, running a fair distance away to the rear beyond a deep ground growing thick with wild and weedy grasses and overgrown bushes that rendered a lot of beauty to that part of the Trishul Park. Therefore, no one really felt particularly vexed by the Roy family’s overactive South Indian dingo: Goldie’s constant weapons-grade, all-claws-out barking, that is.
Capt. Roy Senior’s family liked having that dog around the house, but he himself couldn’t do anything much except just pet the damn barking dog once or twice a week, that’s all. His duty done, he would proceed to the office astride his much-touted, dependable Lambretta and would be seen again in the evening coming home and shushing the dog before entering through the porch garden. (Because of the inconvenience of using their dormitory’s actual front door, which was at the back of the residence, they almost always avoided it. Instead, they opted for the porch door as the permanent entry point to the house.)
--∞--
Goldie died shortly after. A couple of months earlier, Pinku felt certain their darling dog Goldie, three to four years old by then, wouldn’t survive long, and before the year was out, it would pass. It happened exactly as he suspected: it died, possibly, in June 1983. A few years afterwards, Capt. Roy retired from Army service and took up a rented place in the ‘civil area’ before moving in the year 1988 to a newly constructed apartment, leaving Trishul Park once and for all.
The day Goldie died, Arin went to Capt Roy’s dormitory to meet Pinku and maybe play a little cricket on the outside lawn garden. He did not know Goldie had breathed his last that day. It was a Sunday morning; teenagers from the dormitory opposite would join them, and Goldie would do his typical bidding… by barking away endlessly to let all the world know that such a top dog stayed here, so beware! As soon as Arin reached Pinku’s house, he told him that Goldie died a while ago and “we need to go bury it somewhere in the out back.” Down the ravine-like ground sparsely littered with periwinkle plants, wild blooms, and scrawny shrubs at the furthest perimeter of the residential housing, close to the railway tracks that ran along the tunnel-like passage, trudged Pinku as he held Goldie up on his hands: its neck and head lay on one hand and its back half on the other, his friend, and Arin.
As Arin watched, Pinku and his friend, both a few years older, took turns with a long-handled garden shovel, digging and pressing it into the ground with their heels to make a deep hole in the open earth for Goldie’s burial.
Out there on the outer rim of the Trishul Park, Goldie lies buried deep in the earth.
(To be continued…)
(End of part X)
By Arindam Moulick